Sarah Pearsall

Early American and Atlantic World

Office: 104C Harris
Phone: 847-491-4963
E-mail: s-pearsallnorthwestern.edu

Sarah M. S. Pearsall (Ph.D., Harvard, 2001) focuses on early American history, as well as early modern North Atlantic and Caribbean history. She is especially concerned with the interconnections between Atlantic and Caribbean Anglophone colonization, settlement, and revolution in the early modern era, and issues of gender, the family, sexuality, and the household. Her articles on these topics have appeared in various collections, as well as in the William and Mary Quarterly. She is currently completing a book tentatively entitled Atlantic Exchanges: Fractured Families in the Age of the American Revolution. This project uses transatlantic family letters to demonstrate the myriad ways in which families and households reflected, dealt with and, in some cases, contributed to the enormous dislocations engendered by the growth and rupturing of an eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world. She was the 2004-2005 Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her next project, provisionally entitled 'More Wives Than One': Early American Polygamy, 1600-1840, traces the means by which the marital structure of polygyny, and the place and labor of women, became enmeshed with cultural and racial critiques in various locations of the Atlantic (and the Mediterranean and Pacific) worlds.

Curriculum Vitae